Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Final project: Communication and social media

With the development and popularity of the internet, the influence of social media is expanding at a high speed in the past few decades. Because of
the convenience and efficiency of the instant messages on social media, people,
especially the youth, are depending more on social media such as Facebook and Twitter
in their daily life. Obviously social media is changing the way people
communicate in many aspects.

People are changing
the way they know and keep in contact with each other because of the social
media

According to a recent research, Facebook users spend 423
minutes Facebooking each month. Now people are spending more time chatting and
sharing information on social media. The benefit of social media such as
Facebook is that people can know someone more easily .
For example, they can search and discover people sharing same interest by
typing key words in the search bar and then add them as friend on Facebook, or
follow them on Twitter. Also people may find some mutual friends without the introduction by the friends they already know, and they can learn something about those people by browsing their personal
pages.

Another benefit of social media is that it helps people keep in touch with others.
Sometimes when people can’t meet face to face because of the far distance and the busy schedule, they can still know what’s going
on with their friends by reading the statuses they post. Social media is also a good tool for
people to remember lots of names in their social circle although some of them only meet once before.

However, depending
too much on the social network may have negative effect on people’s
communication skills

Face to face communication is based on many important
factors. People express themselves not only by what they say, but also by
nonverbal languages such as their body gestures, intonations and facial
expression. All of these factors compose a full person. However, when people
rely too much on social media, they can only know about others by reading what they
are typing. People may have some problems understanding what others mean when chatting online
because they can’t see that person and they have to guess what he/she is really
thinking about.

Also when people communicate face to face, they need highly
concentrate in the conversation and quickly make responses. But when sending messages
on the internet, people may have more time to think about what to say for response, so that they can
do anything they want during the chat. It was reported that some teenagers who got
used to chatting online had difficulty in communicating with others in daily
life because they couldn’t respond quickly to the ideas while they talked to others.

This is the opinion
of an expert on the issue of social media and communication: